Article on stakeholder analysis

[martinig]

The Methods & Tools newsletter has just released in its html archive section the article "Using Stakeholder Analysis in Software Project Management" by Bas de Baar. Stakeholder analysis is a technique to identify and analyze the stakeholders surrounding a project. A proper analysis of the stakeholders will help you to construct a project approach suited to the situation and will allow you to negotiate better with the stakeholders.

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archi...hive.php?id=48

[Manjeet]

Hello martinig,

I am goin to do my dissertation on stake holders in IT industry.So if you have any more information .Please can you let me know about it

[harrywaldron]

Yes, Project Management has both "technical" and "people components.

If you neglect the people side and particularly the stakeholders, projects tend to get off on a bad start and folks are not on board with respect to executive decisions, directions, and meeting critical business needs. Stakeholders are the very reason and foundation for the project and this type of analysis is valuable

[projectmanager]

In business, one can never downplay the importance of stakeholder commitment. The meaning of “stakeholder” is crucial here. It is quite surprising to find multiple meanings of stakeholders in business and in project management, but one catches attention. You may realize that one such definition you have hung on to, based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), could use a more compelling version. In as early as 1963, the Stanford Research Institute defined stakeholders as “those groups without whose support the organization will cease to exist.” The core concept, in other words, was “survival;” without the support of such key groups, the firm will not survive.

As management guru Stephen Covey succinctly puts it, “Your organization is a complex ecosystem of multiple, interdependent parts both inside and outside its formal boundaries-and your stakeholders are its most important elements.”

Considering this, and some organization’s reactions to simply ignore stakeholders because managing them is just “too hard,” means, “suicidal.” The concrete messiness of managing stakeholder commitment has to be accepted as an issue critical to success, even if it is not as sexy as defining the perfect solution or building the new [office] intranet.